Who says a ring doesn’t go with … handcuffs? Marvel at this while-being-arrested wedding proposal, along with a few amusing others. The heartbreaking ones, I couldn’t watch. But this one? BG said yes!

16 Embarrassing Marriage Proposals, via BuzzFeed

From EthanZuckerman.com:

Marriage, as it turns out, is an extremely good predictor of happiness. Married people make more money per capita, eat better, live longer, have more sex and enjoy it more. In terms of comparisons of happiness, you’d need to be making $100,000 more as an unmarried person to be as happy as a married person. (On average, and your mileage may vary, of course. And please, keep in mind, this is Gilbert talking, not me.) Is this a causal relationship? Maybe happier people are simply more likely to get married? That’s true, but studies over time reveal a very common pattern — people are less happy before marriage, experience a happiness peak shortly after marriage, and become slightly less happy a few years into marriage, though remain significantly happier than before marriage.

Well, that’s better news than something about marriage, after all that, making you less happy. But please keep this from the folks who are happiest of all when they’re bugging singles to shack up.

Via Mary Elizabeth Williams at Broadsheet:

Marital breakups are rarely easy, but for couples with children, they often come with the added nagging fear that you’re forever ruining your kids’ lives. But a new study (PDF) affirms what anyone whose own childhood resembled a Richard Yates novel suspects — that sticking together for the sake of the kids can backfire.

The study, provocatively titled “Are Both Parents Always Better Than One? Parental Conflict and Young Adult Well-Being” (from the California Center for Population Research at the University of California-Los Angeles), charts the progress of 1,963 households from teens to early 30s. While citing that “children tend to do better living with two biological married parents,” the study is a reassuring academic loogie in the face of self-sacrifice, an acknowledgement of the role of “poor quality marriage” in drinking and dropout rates.

Speaking about the study to Science Daily, the paper’s co-author, Cornell associate professor Kelly Musick, said, “the advantages of living with two continuously married parents are not shared equally by all children … Children from high-conflict families are more likely to drop out of school, have poor grades, smoke, binge drink, use marijuana, have early sex, be young and unmarried when they have a child and then experience the breakup of that relationship.”

An intact marriage isn’t automatically a successful one — for anybody. (The study also helpfully cites previous findings that “although marriage confers benefits to adults on average, those in poor quality marriages are no better off than the single and, indeed, may fare worse on some measures.”) Despite our continued cultural insistence upon equating divorce with failure, for parents whose relationships have become unbearable, the best way to save the family may be to dissolve it.

Via Broadsheet:

Today, as we know, all that’s required to be a good husband is to take your wife to a show, let her mother move in and lead the free world as a symbol of hope and change. But now we have evidence that some degree of enlightenment has long been expected of the male helpmeet. Witness this recently exhumed 1933 “Test For Husbands” (via Fark), which — while stating, in parts, the should-be obvious — is not quite as fossil-icious as one might expect. It assigns 1 demerit each for transgressions such as “objects to wife’s driving auto” and “snores” (and 5 for “tells lies, not dependable” and “flirts with other women while out with wife”), while awarding 5 points each for “gives wife ample allowance or turns paycheck over to her,” “frequently compliments wife re looks, cooking, housekeeping, etc.” — and, yes, “has date with wife at least once per week.” (Thirty years later, Don Draper: FAIL.) Precisely what kind of date is not helpfully specified. Today, thank goodness, we have Rick Santorum for that.

Bitch Magazine on the press’s love/hate (mostly love) relationship with the Obama Marriage:

“The media wants to go on a big, fat date with the OBAMA MARRIAGE and either propose to it and embarrass it in front of the whole restaurant, or stand it up and embarrass it in front of the whole restaurant, depending on who you ask. Why is that?” And: Which camp are you in?
Well?

Sean Gregory at Time.com:

The list of reasons to admire Barack Obama is longer than Pennsylvania Avenue. But please, and I’m begging here, let’s not hold him up as an exemplary husband simply because he takes his wife out on a date.

On Sunday, the New York Times did just that, with a story headlined “If They Can Find Time For a Date Night…” The gist: if the Obamas — with Mom committed to her various causes and Dad trying to save the free world — can still find time for each other, hey, lame husband sitting on the couch watching sports, time to step it up. /snip/

Yes, daily down time and date nights are cathartic and healthy: my wife and I, working parents with two young children, have strived, with varying amounts of success, to find the right moments to put out an APB for a sitter. But in the relationship department, no husband or couple should ever wonder why they’re not meeting a standard set by the Obamas.

Did you catch that NBC special on the White House? The Obamas happen to have some of the world’s smartest people working tirelessly on the dirty details of governance. Think those staffers working ’til midnight and grinding away the weekends spend a ton of blissful time with their wives? Chief of staff Rahm Emmanuel is killing himself while his wife and kids are stuck back in Chicago. Now there’s a guy I can relate to. /snip/

Air Force One makes romantic evenings in Paris a lot more possible.

The thing is, Obama is the first to acknowledge his enormous leg up when it comes to family life. He’s obviously working hard, and you can’t blame him for taking advantage of his situation to eat dinner with Michelle and the kids. I would do the same thing if I were President. But I’m not. And I’d thank the world to stop reminding me of that little fact, especially on date night.

Only 44 more to go! (We’re talking to you, New York.)

It’s a peculiar political marriage between a man and a man: “Eight and a half years after their epic partisan battle over the fate of the 2000 presidential election, the lawyers David Boies and Theodore B. Olson appeared on the same team on Wednesday as co-counsel in a federal lawsuit that has nothing to do with hanging chads, butterfly ballots or Electoral College votes,” today’s New York Times reports. “Their mutual goal: overturning Proposition 8, California’s freshly affirmed ban on same-sex marriage. It is a fight that jolted many gay rights advocates — and irritated more than a few — but that Mr. Boies and Mr. Olson said was important enough to, temporarily at least, set aside their political differences.”

Here’s what Olson had to say at a news conference: “If you look into the eyes and hearts of people who are gay and talk to them about this issue, that reinforces in the most powerful way possible the fact that these individuals deserve to be treated equally.”

Yep. For a man with a lot of penance to take care of, it’s really a pretty good start.

Update: Oh, wait.

May … September … February 9, 1998…

Dear Breakup Girl,

I have been seeing a much younger man for about two years now (he’s 28 and I am 58). We are really crazy about each other but I am afraid that I may offer him more of a mother-figure relationship than one of a lover. We haven’t talked about “where we are” lately, but should I let him go, or make something more permanent out of it? Yes, I mean marriage. Would it be fair for someone my age to try to wed a young stud like him?

— Darry

 
Dear Darry,

Wow, that is a May-September thing (yeah, as in May 1958, September 1998). Let me ask you this: are you worried about the mother-figure thing in principle, or in practice? I mean, does your concern stem from a vague “Is this weird?” notion — or from some actual dynamic you guys have (e.g. when he didn’t call to say he’d be late for dinner, you took away his phone privileges). Or, for that matter, is there some Freud-oid episode in his past (oh, say, loss of his mother) that might predispose him to seek out a substitute? Or one in your past that might predispose you to be that substitute?

(more…)

On NPR.org, from FOBG Nancy Goldstein (married to super-cool cartoonist):

The cost of love isn’t an abstract concept in my household: It’s precisely $1,820 per year. That’s the “gay tax” we shell out for me to be on my wife’s health insurance plan, because her company must treat that benefit as additional taxable income.

The media’s primary focus on the morality debate around same-sex marriage means that most of the public, gay or straight, knows little about the very real economic costs of inequality. It doesn’t matter that Joan and I married in Massachusetts five years ago this week, or that our home state recognizes our marriage. It makes no difference that she works for a progressive company with an active LGBT employees group. Companies pay for their employees’ health insurance with pretax money through a federal program, and same-sex marriage isn’t federally recognized.

Read the rest here.